Melbourne-based startup Rewardle, which digitises the traditional ‘buy 9, get 1 free’ paper punch card, is rapidly gaining popularity amongst High St merchants. Today, the startup announces that it is the first Australian company to integrate with Revel Systems, one of the world’s leading iPad Point of Sale providers.

While tablets have taken the consumer market by storm as entertainment devices, they are increasingly being used in commercial applications. iPads and Android tablets are being adopted by retailers as a replacement to the humble cash register.

With Rewardle, merchants simply place a tablet running the app on their counter, allowing customers to interact with the tablet using a card or the Rewardle smartphone app to record their visit, collect points and redeem rewards.

The startup was born with the mission of providing the digital engagement tools and business intelligence used by large retail chains to local High St merchants by unlocking the power of mobile computing, cloud based software and big data analysis. More recently, Rewardle has extended its utility by adding pre-payment, mobile ordering and social media integrations.

Founder of Rewardle, Ruwan Weerasooriya points to recent reports that technology giant Oracle is in the final stages of acquiring Point of Sale provider Micros for more than $5 billion as an example of the value access to transaction data offers technology companies.

“The Point of Sale industry is large, highly fragmented and is going through a profound disruption with tablet based solutions offering a powerful alternative to the traditional PC based Point of Sales systems and cash registers,” he said.

A partnership with Revel Systems is a big win for Rewardle, as it joins the ranks of billion dollar tech companies such as Paypal, Xero and Groupon.

Founded in 2010, the San Francisco-based startup Revel has become a global leader in tablet-based Point of Sale, with more than 5,000 businesses, primarily in restaurants, retail and grocery, using its iPad-based Point of Sale platform. In addition to managing transactions, Revel offers tools for managing other aspects to the business, such as payroll, inventory tracking and more.

The battle for the merchant counter top is being fought out between a number of well-backed tablet and cloud-based Point of Sale providers that have bolstered their war chests with significant funding.

In June 2013, Revel secured over $10 million; in March 2014, NZ-born startup Vend raised $20 million which included investment from Australian VC SquarePeg Capital; and in April 2014, ShopKeep secured $25 million. Last week, local aspirant Kounta scored multimillion dollar funding from accounting software company MYOB.

Internationally, payments providers such as Square and PayPal are also entering the Point of Sale space; and locally, Commonwealth Bank has been working on an internal project called Commbank Pi since July 2012.

According to Weerasooriya, the disruption occurring in the Point of Sale industry has held him back from committing the valuable time and resources of his startup to integration work.

“There is a bit of an arms race going on in the space and in making a decision to commit resources to integration it was important that we back winners. Due to its global scale, financially backing and positive impression we see in market, Revel is among a handful of providers that we see enduring in the long term,” he said.

“The Revel integration adds basket of goods data to the Rewardle platform that we can use to help merchants with more sophisticated customer segmentation and granular targeting of marketing messages.

“The holy grail of marketing is landing the right message, in front of the right person, at the right time. We use big data analysis techniques that have been used by big retailers for years to help local merchants to tailor their marketing and communications.”